


A Thawing

by framboise



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Recovery, Romance, Sex In A Cave, Storytelling, Suicidal Thoughts, wildling sansa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-05
Updated: 2017-09-05
Packaged: 2018-12-23 19:20:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11996316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/framboise/pseuds/framboise
Summary: A younger Oberyn, grieving the loss of his dearest sister, and testing the bounds of his own mortality, journeys north to range beyond the Wall, following the rumours of a flame-haired wildling as beautiful and deadly as the ice itself.“I know why you have come here,” she interrupts him, pierces him with her furious cold gaze, “I know it by the look in your eyes, the lack of supplies on your back, the limpness of your grip on that spear, your lack of hood or hat, by your lack of horse, your lack of companions. Shall I go on?” she says, “You are not the first of your kind, prince, to travel here searching for death.”





	A Thawing

**Author's Note:**

>   
>  I’ve read, and loved, stories where Oberyn meets Sansa at a point when she is thinking of ending her own life, and I thought it would be interesting to reverse their positions.  
>   
> Sansa is not a Stark in this story; and, having been raised by the free folk, her background and personality are a little different, but hopefully still recognisable.  
>   
> ***A note on content and possible triggers: This story contains discussions about suicide, and Sansa uses loaded terms like ‘cowardice’ and ‘bravery’, these should not be extrapolated out beyond the world of the story as any reflection of my own opinions. Please be mindful of any triggers you might have.  
> 

 

 

Oberyn finds her dancing inside the warm cave thirteen days walk from the Wall, in the steam of the hot spring nearby. She is bowing to a crowd of imagined dance partners, spinning about with her eyes closed, holding up her invisible skirts. She is picturing a ball, a dance at court, he realises; such are the apparent daydreams of the vicious She-wolf of the north.

She is bare but for a scrap of linen about her hips. Her skin is pale as snow, and decorated by scars like the striations in a block of ice; her body lithe; her hair like a tangle of fire down to her waist.

“You dance well, my lady,” he says, spear dangling loose at his side.

She stops; stares at him with wide blue eyes that look a little like those belonging to some creature he might have caught in a trap; and then, after a movement almost too quick to follow, she has a bow in her hand, an arrow already notched, and the left side of his chest, his heart, in her aim.

“Who goes there?” she asks, her voice low like the threat of thunder in the distance.

“I am Prince Oberyn Nymeros Martell. I travel from Dorne.”

He feels, suddenly, like he has come in supplication to some wild goddess; like this cave has been the place he has truly been aiming for, ever since he fled his home in shame and grief.

 

*

 

He was inconsolable when he heard about the manner of Elia’s death; about the treacheries she had suffered, about her lost children, her debasement, her dishonour, about the cruelties of the Lannisters, and the vow-breaking of her worthless husband whom he would have killed were he not already dead.

Oberyn has promised to his brother that he will not seek revenge; that he will not travel to King’s Landing to poison them all where they sit, fat and laughing and _unworthy_ of living. He has promised, because Dorne is not ready yet for war, it will likely never be; because he values the life of his brother, his family, his people and home.

But without revenge, what is he? What can he do, what can he be; how can he live in this world without Elia?

He left Dorne, and its reminders, and went abroad. He fought, and fucked, and adventured, and duelled and sparred, made daring heists, he battled; he tested the bounds of his own mortality; always managing, despite himself, to escape from doom at the last moment; to snatch his life out of the jaws of death before the end.

But he is tired of fighting, and winning; he is tired of everything; and when moons ago he woke from a dream of ice and snow, he decided to set off north to the Wall and beyond.

He cannot fight a whole season, a frozen landscape, the great might of the weather; he reasons; thus he will find his deliverance in the snow.

Those at the Wall counselled him against travelling further north; looked at him as if he was mad, this privileged prince of Dorne; and perhaps he is. They spoke too of the strength of the wildlings, their ferocity and bloodthirstiness, the countless men they had killed; and of one wildling in particular, the Red She-wolf they called her, whose arrows have felled many, whose skill as a hunter was without measure, who ranged alone like the wolf of her namesake, bold and brave, deadly and beautiful.

This was the creature he was looking for, he thought, and now he has found her.

 

*

 

“Why have you come here beyond the Wall; why do you intrude upon me as I am bathing, Prince of Dorne?” she asks.

“I travel here only to –”

“I know why you have come here,” she interrupts him, pierces him with a furious cold gaze, her arrow still aimed at his heart, “I know it by the look in your eye, the lack of supplies on your back, the limpness of your grip on that spear, your lack of hood or hat, by your lack of horse, your lack of companions. Shall I go on? You are not the first of your kind,”

She moves closer, her feet soft as snow. It is darkening in the cave now, even with the light of the torches she has lit; there is a storm brewing outside.

“I have seen your ilk before. Do you think yourself so special? I am tired, _my prince_ , of being expected to kill men _for_ them.”

“My lady–”

“Do you think you are the only man who has come north looking for the absolution of death, looking for the cold or for a wildling like me to take their hands and lead them towards it, because they are cowards and will not fall on their own swords, because they think the cold will given them a painless end? Ice burns, _my prince_ , freezing to death is _agony_.”

He can feel his chin shake at her fury, at her fire; it is as if he is a child again, scolded by his mother.

“Will you let your arrow loose?” he asks.

“Do you want me to?” she replies, and they both know that he would nod in reply if only he were brave enough.

She drops her bow.

“You have interrupted my bath,” she says, “my shoulders are sore from hunting, my flesh cold. But I do not trust you, standing there with your spear; even if you do have a death wish, scared men do foolish things too. You will join me in the waters so that I can keep an eye on you.”

“As my lady wishes,” he says, after a moment of speechlessness.

 

*

 

The hair between her legs is just as fiery as that on her head when she whips the linen off and ducks into the pool, watching him unblinkingly.

He sets down his spear, his meagre pack, and peels off the furs he paid a servant at the Wall to make for him. He removes his underclothes; aware and ashamed, even now, since he is still only a man and not yet something beyond, of the pitiful nature of his manhood which has retreated towards his body in the cold. He slips into the warm waters of the spring and lets out a groan of pleasure, despite himself, feels the heat flow into his limbs, soothe his chilled heart. His eyes snap open.

She is watching him with a smirk.

“You were dancing when I interrupted you,” he says, the warmth of the spring returning some of the personality that has frozen in the cold and with his grief, “You dream of the south, don’t you, of dances and dresses and court. You are very beautiful; you have a courteous mien despite your somewhat brusque nature. I believe that you could travel south and find a place there, my lady, away from the hardships here.”

He has always had a weakness for saving maidens and women; he likes to give people what they want, to fulfil their desires; he still wishes to be a hero, even now.

She tilts her head to one side thoughtfully; the water licks at the paleness of her shoulders.

“My mother was taken from south of the Wall, stolen,” she says, “she accepted her lot. Her life here did not always suit her, she was not always happy, although her children made her happy, but she made the best of it before she passed.”

He bows his head in shared sorrow.

“She named me a southron name,” she says, after dipping back under the water to wet her hair.

“What is your name?” he asks, realising now that She-wolf cannot be her only name, just as the Red Viper is not his.

“Sansa.”

“A pretty name.”

She smiles, ruefully.

“I am not a fool,” she says, “My mother told me about the south, about the dangers and sadness for women there, even with the dresses and the cakes and the dances and the songs,” she smiles again and he can see the little girl she once was, imagine her on her mother’s lap begging for one more story.

“That is why I am still here. I remain out of the love I bore her, her hopes for me, even though the girl inside of me has never let go of that childish wish to visit the south, that dream. What did you dream of, Prince, before your heart was broken, before you discovered the darkness that could lurk at the depths of men?”

She drifts closer in the water, a chilled hand brushes briefly against his arm, “Tell me about your home.”

He tells her about Dorne. He tells her about the palace where he grew up, Sandstone where he was fostered, and all the lands between; about the giant whale that beached near Sunspear when he was a boy, how he raced down to the shore and stared into its massive, soulful eye before it died; about his travels on the rivers, the canoe he made from reeds which chucked him in the water only a few moments after he had boasted that it could hold his weight; the time he was close to death in the desert, followed by a sand dog with a taste for flesh who trotted behind him patient as the Stranger himself, waiting for him to lie down and never get up again.

He tells her about the first man he ever slept with, under the shade of a grove of blood oranges, the man's brother who he slept with the next night in the very same spot, how the taste of oranges always reminds him of them both; the first time he was in his cups and how Elia held back his hair when he vomited out of a window of the Tower of the Sun; the people he had seen come ashore at Planky Town, their strange clothes and customs; the pillow houses in Planky Town, the pillow houses in Sunspear; the red and white sands of the deserts; about the Water Gardens where he and Elia played with the other children of Dorne, how he would sing for her there even though his voice was poor, turning her into the heroine of every song he told.

He tells her about the sandstorms and the ghosts that came with them, swallowing whole villages; the sights and smells and sounds of the bazaars at Sunspear, the beauty of the Sept, cool inside even on the hottest of days; the skeleton he had found once, emerging from a rock near the Tor, how it resembled no animal he had ever heard about; racing sand steeds across the desert, chasing the sun on horseback; training with weapons in courtyards and training grounds until he did not have the strength to walk back to his rooms and slept in a corridor instead.

He tells her about the sounds of Sunspear waking up, the calls and murmurs, and the cries of the birds, the sweetness of the sea breeze that found its way through the shuttered windows of his home, taunting him with adventures abroad; the sunsets in the desert, the sunrises at Sunspear, how the light glinted off the towers, and the sun burned off the morning dew within moments.

She listens to him speak and does not look away once.

“You speak of it as if you are already mourning," she says, once he is done, "that you have lost your home; but Dorne still stands, it is only waiting for you to return.”

The tenderness of her tone guts him; her words and her manner have unmanned him.

“Do you council everyone that travels north,” he says, “get them to cry and weep at your feet; is this your true weapon?”

“Only the pretty ones, the handsome ones like yourself,” she says, “I tell the rest that they can freeze if they like, but I’ll not do it for them,” she laughs darkly.

He knows now that she is lying, that she has a tender heart hidden underneath all those furs, that pale skin; that is it only the impotence, the sorrow and fear, of meeting so many who wish to end their lives, that has turned her outwardly cold and hard as ice.

“You are very beautiful, my lady, your eyes are like the depths of ice, your hair like the flame of sunrise.”

“Men have told me this,” she agrees, without boastfulness.

“Ah, even my compliments are old and tired – you see what a poor shadow of a Dornishman I am now? We are supposed to be the very best of lovers,” he lets his arms raise to the surface of the water, his body shift back and forth, “Do you have a lover?”

“No.”

“But you have had one before?”

“Of course, life is too fragile here for us to remain maidens while waiting for our one true loves.”

“But you like to hear tales,” he says shrewdly, seeing to the very heart of her, “tales about those who _do_ wait, about knights and fair maidens, and grand love stories, do you not?”

“I do,” she pauses and then sits up imperiously on the underwater rock shelf, her damp hair curling around her bare breasts; her eyes seem to glow with a gleam like from a song and the sound in the cave seems to hush. “Prince Oberyn, for sparing your life from my arrow, for allowing you passage through my lands, you owe me three stories. Tell me three tales of the south that I have never heard before and I shall allow you to live.”

Her body softens and she moves closer and cups his face with her hand, the shock of her tender touch almost unbearable. “Give me something to dream of when I am shivering in the endless night and thinking on the different lives I might have had; were I someone else; were I a warm, pampered southroner.”

 

*

 

His first story is of Maris the Maid; her legendary beauty, the fifty lords who vied for her hands, the tourney that was held and the man who went mad when she married another, how he haunted the lands outside her keep and never gave her any peace, how she wished her daughters would not be cursed with beauty like her so they would not turn men mad on their behalf.

His second tale is of Rose of Red Lake; a skinchanger who turned into a Crane to fly away from her suitors, of the man she fell in love with who was humble and true, and who she told to meet her at the shore so that they might run away together, how when he saw a Crane sitting in their boat he thought he might gift its feathers to his love for her wedding dress and so he pierced its breast with his arrow, only then realising as he held the dying woman in his arms, just what he had done, how you can still hear him crying sometimes on dark nights without a moon, dark nights when a beloved might mistake his lover for prey instead.

His third, and last, and longest, tale is of his sister; every story of her life, all the events that led to her death.

He has spoken little of Elia since she was taken from him and the words come spilling out now like the wall that held them up has crumbled; the pictures of their childhood together, the glimpses he had of her at court, flash behind his eyes like he is whirling in front of a fire, like the ice in his mind has thawed; and a torrent of grief and love and emotion streams from his dry mouth.

He does not know how long he speaks, how long they sit there in the dim of the cave, but once he is finished; once there are no more words left; he feels a sense of peace that he has not felt for many years; fragile but still present, like a layer of ice firming slowly atop the lake of his sorrows, thickening so that he might be able to stand on it someday, to walk across it towards the shore.

 

*

 

He remains there in the cave, sleeps alongside her that night on the pile of furs they make from both of their clothing. He goes out hunting with her the next day and she mocks his spear; competes with him to catch the most hares, whose white coats make them almost invisible against the snow; shows him how to trap foxes and find his way across the landscape, make shelters out of snow and mask smells from the bears. He waits for her; when she returns a few days later to her people to give them the spare meat, keeping himself hidden from them for his own safety, as she had wished; and when she returns to him in the cave he feels his heart lift at the sight of her, soar, and that night they make love for the first time.

She holds his gaze as she rides him, swallowing him with her cunt and her eyes. She is so hot inside, burning, and wet like the spring they lie beside. He sups on her cunt, surprising her; her cries echo around the cave and he is not satisfied until she has come thrice, four times, five. All the loving he has done feels like a preparation, training, for loving her; for seeing to the pleasure of this snow princess.

Afterwards, he brushes his hands along the scars on her skin and she narrates her various misfortunes, the battles she has fought and won against the landscape of the north, its animals and people, against the cold. It is only then, when he is not frantic with her, her smell and her taste and her sounds, that he notices that she is missing a toe on her left foot, frozen off by the cold she says, and he feels a welling of such tenderness for her and kisses her foot until she tugs it away from him asking if he is one of those strange fools who like their women to rub them with the soles of their feet. He tells her that he has tried that before but it is not to his taste. _What is to your taste_? she asks and they spent the next nights teaching each other their bodies and searching for new pleasures.

He likes it when they are quiet together, gasping softly, breathing in each other's hot breaths, as the cold from outside glances over their bodies and the light flickers from the torches. He likes leaving the mouth of the cave for a bracing piss in the middle of the night and coming back to find that she has stolen all the furs. He likes feeding her the few berries they find, plucked from grizzled bushes; and brushing her long red hair, plaiting it the way he used to plait his sister's.

He describes to her the fashions he has seen on his travels, the beauty of different peoples, his conquests. She tells him of the women she has loved and the single other man; he tells her he is glad that he has only one man to compete with then and she hits him on the arm and tells him that he could never ever be as good as any of the women and he sets out to show her that that is a bald-faced lie indeed, and they lose two days of hare-hunting to his particular indoor quest but she is yet unconvinced.

He falls in love with her as the moons pass, irrevocably; even as he fears that it is a small love, and a small life, he offers.

This life here in the north is hard; it only takes a moment to lose your way in a blizzard, to freeze, to fall down a hidden crevasse; hunger lurks at the open door of the cave. It is not a life he would have wished for as a youth; it is not a life that brings him any great pleasures now, beyond the joy of her company, beyond their nights together.

But he could live here, with her; he could live here and not sprint towards his death like he had wished to, but instead walk towards it, hand in hand with her – for lives are never long in the frozen wastes of the north.

If she would only have him.

 

*

 

Some moons later they are sitting in the cave he thinks of as their home; around a fire which spits flames and sparks out into the air, which turns her whole body red across from him, like she is a fire goddess and not the ice maiden he thought when he first saw her.

“I wish to stay here, with you,” he says, in the manner of a vow. “I want to make a life with you, to have children with you should you wish, to live and die here, as a member of the free folk, as your man, should you have me.”

Her eyes close, she sighs heavily. “No,” she says.

“I will be good for you,” he argues. “I will do whatever you wish, be whomever you want me to be. I will look after you and follow you and love you, I swear this.”

“No, Prince Oberyn. You shall not stay here.”

He stands up, furious and sad and disbelieving. Does the love he bear for her mean so little; is he such a poor version of a man, to her?

“You are a Prince, are you not,” she says, standing too, “and you still have one sibling, a brother who rules Dorne without your help; you have a household, a home, a country, a _people_. You have responsibilities.”

She continues, before he can correct her, moving closer, “My own father has many children, many mouths to feed; and the free folk have many other good archers and hunters.”

She takes his hands in hers, she is smiling, she does not look scornful, “It is _I_ who will accompany _you_ , Oberyn. You will take me back to Dorne with you. You will not ignore your own responsibilities, because you do not wish to be such a man, truly, both you and I know this.”

“You would leave everything for me, everything you have ever known. _I am not worth it_ ,” he says. His voice breaks, the words seem to shatter against the walls of the cave.

“I shall decide that. This self-pitying does not become you.”

She is tall like a queen, as sure and unbending as a column of rock, “Your grief has been warped by your pride, you dwell on all the things you could have done, but it is not your story, it is your sister’s story, you do her shame by not remembering that, by wishing to throw your life away as she never wished you to do on her behalf.”

“How do you know?” he says, the last of the angry tears he will shed in the north melting down his cheeks.

“Only a person of the very blackest heart wishes those that come after them never recover, never _live_ again, only the very worst person would want you to forfeit your own life, and your sister was not that person, was she.”

“No,” he says.

“Live and remember.” She tells him, and he takes her face in his hands and kisses her deeply, passionately, as if he might melt together with her, as if they might never be parted; this snow maiden, this seer in a cave that has appeared to him like a benediction he did not deserve.

“Oberyn,” she says, pulling back from him, “I have always wanted to travel south, I have always dreamt of dresses and dances and lords and ladies, songs and knights of great valour; I have dreamt of _warmth_ , and of a great love. Let me come with you, please, do this for me.”

“Might I steal you then, my love,” he says, the tears dried up like they were never there, tucking her into his body so that she might borrow the warmth of a southron son, a son of Sunspear, “Might I steal you away from this life and take you to the barbarous, strange, lands of the south?

“A free man does not ask,” she says, her words muffled by his chest, “he _acts_. He steals.”

And he carries her giggling, and naked, out into the snow and, once the cold of it has shocked both of their nerves, restarted their sluggish hearts, they go back inside the cave to dress and pack up their belongings, to make a proper plan.

 

*

 

Oberyn takes her south. He saves her from the cold as she wished to save him. They travel through the lands of Westeros, through the north that she calls south, the Barrowlands, the Neck, the Twins, through Riverrun and the Reach and down to Dorne. He crosses his own lands with her, back and forth and down and across; showing her the harsh beauty of the desert landscape, as dangerous in some places as the north could be, as inhospitable. He dines in every keep and tower and town; reforging diplomatic ties on behalf of his brother, who was so grateful to see him again, and grateful in turn to Sansa for bringing him back.

Sansa is the one who catches sweet Ellaria Sand’s eye when they dine with Harmen Uller in the Hellholt, and it is only some hours into the evening that Ellaria realises that the prince that accompanies her flame-haired beauty is himself very handsome too. The three of them quickly become inseparable and Ellaria agrees to come with them to Sunspear, to join their household.

Later, on an unhappy but necessary visit to King’s Landing, it is Sansa who sees a kindred spirit in Arya; the only Stark daughter, abused by the Lannisters; and she who encourages Oberyn to help her spirit this other wolf away to Dorne after they have killed the Mountain together; to disguise her as another wildling lover of his (to Arya’s annoyance, for she already has a lover, a blacksmith by the name of Gendry, and she resents the mummery of pretending that she is impressed by Oberyn and his smooth, southron charms).

Arya suits the freedoms of Dorne as much as Sansa suits its accompanying refinements; and she is thrilled by Sansa’s stories of the wild north beyond Winterfell; together they plot ways in which they might save Arya’s last remaining siblings.

Once Sansa is settled in her new home, Oberyn comes to her remorsefully and says that, free as they are in Dorne, he cannot marry her, that custom will not allow it.

And in return Sansa says, _what do I want with a marriage? A wedding would be nice – all those dresses and dances and cakes – but I do not want to take your name, to be owned by you. That is not freedom_.

 _Hear, hear_ , Ellaria says when she has heard from her of their lover’s foolishness.

Ellaria and Sansa bear Oberyn children; and help him to gather up those children that he has already spread in his earlier wild travels, to make a home, a family.

 

*

 

Through her simple delights as they travel south from the north, as they settle in their new life together; through the _joy_ Sansa finds in cakes, and warmth and dresses and the animals of the south, the scenery, the fields and woods and flowers and buildings and towns and cities, the people; Oberyn falls back in love with Westeros too, he falls back in love with life.

It is to his shame that it takes Sansa to lead him back from grief, to show him all that he would have thrown away; and in penance he sets out to become the brother his sister had believed him to be, the son that Dorne had wished him to be, the prince; though not by giving up any of his scandalous ways, his acts of daring: his chases through the night, his races and fights, his lovemaking and gambles, his championing of those who need champions.

And, having stood at the very brink of death, having looked into the darkness of his own soul, he finds that he is talented at noticing the same landscape in others, at saving them from themselves. As his love, Sansa, She-wolf of the north, flame of the morning, with skin as pale as snow and eyes as blue as unbreakable ice, once did for him.

He tells the story to his children; hires a bard to tell it too, to spread the tale beyond the bounds of Dorne; because she deserves songs written about her, and he wishes only to give her everything her heart desires, now that she has returned to him his own.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Please comment! I’d love to hear what people think.
> 
>  
> 
> I think there's probably another version of this story too; where Oberyn meets an aged-up Sansa Stark at Winterfell on his way to the Wall, falls in love with her and starts his recovery there; but I was taken with the idea of the slightly otherworldly cave setting and of Sansa being a bit like a sphinx from the myths, asking for payment in stories, and their time together there a little like the island of lotus-eaters in the Odyssey. Plus I got to use as many snow/ice/cold metaphors as my heart desired :)


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